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GELID Silent Spirit Review

Overall the packaging is good, the heat sink looks good, and operated quietly. The CPU ran stable, even at higher temperatures from overclocking. The arched design makes it fairly easy to use the Intel pushpin method, and clearance wasn’t an issue with surrounding components like capacitors and other heat sinks on the motherboard. While clearance was not an issue the proper orientation of the Silent Spirit is mandatory if you want any hope of controlling the temperatures on a core I7 processor. The Silent Spirit is definitely silent, although it appears that some cooling was sacrificed for silence. The heat sink does indeed cool the Intel core i7 CPU's but needs the socket 1366 bracket kit to make the switch from the as delivered socket 775 configuration. The Core i7 CPUs are supported when the bracket kit is ordered. Only Phenoms up to 9850 (125w) are supported, leaving out the Phenom 9950 for some reason, which is a 140w CPU. Performance wise the Silent Spirit performed better than the stock cooling by 11 degrees Celsius under load with the default voltage and speed of 2.66GHz. When the clock speeds and voltage were increased the Silent Spirit still out performed the stock cooler by 6 degrees Celsius under load. Not stunning but when cooling choices are made for decreases of a degree or two, six and eleven degrees Celsius are pretty steep improvements over the Intel factory cooling solution. The Silent Spirit is easily one of the quietest heat sinks I have used using the ear test to measure how loud a heat sink is, By no means is this scientific but when hidden in a chassis the cooler was inaudible, unlike most of the air cooled system I have where the fans on the heat sink are easily the loudest part of the build. The addition of a louder more powerful fan would definitely help the cooling capabilities but at a noise penalty that would remove the Silent from the name of Gelids Silent Spirit. This cooer is not meant to compete with the big dogs of the air cooling world but it is meant to compete in the stock replacement market. If you take into account the 30 dollar price tag coupled with the better than stock cooling you really can't go wrong. Better than stock cooling, ease of installation, low noise, low cost of ownership, good looks, what else do you need?